Walt Dunnigan

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember, and tonight, a Monday with nothing in it, you stop pretending the wanting is a hobby. The films, the stories, the threads at two in the morning, all of it was looking at a door. Now there is a page with a wheel on it, vessel.cards, and you pay, and you spin, and you do not believe it will work.

It works.

Weight first. Your back is against a headboard, and there is a phone in both hands, warm from the heat of them. Your thumb is already moving. The air smells of fryer oil and a window unit working too hard. Somewhere outside the heavy dark presses on the glass. It is Sunday night here, and the lock screen is full of notifications for a name that isn't his. A secondhand phone, an app someone sent him, and he was trying it.

Your thumb goes down through the stranger's messages at the speed of a man catching up on his own. Your hands know how. They are not yours, and they are quick.

Then the touching starts to talk. The hoodie against your arms is soft and gone at the cuffs, and it hands you a morning in a truck stop lot at first light, gravel and diesel, the hood pulled up against a wet chill, the quiet of nobody else awake yet, the plain pleasure of walking once around the rig and kicking each tire. The beanie is tight on your skull and gives you his wife pulling it down over his ears in a kitchen, laughing at how he looks, and the feeling is a warm, stupid ease you have never earned. Your thumb finds the ring through the glass edge of the phone, and with it comes a church basement, a folding chair, her father shaking his hand too long. Under that, smaller and older, another woman's laugh in a parked car, an ex who still sits somewhere in him like a stone in a boot. He has never told his wife how often he thinks of her.

A toothpick is in the corner of his mouth. You did not put it there. It is already splintered flat from his teeth, and the habit tastes of pine and of every empty mile. He doesn't drink. He never did. The memory is of a man he loved pouring it out and of himself, nine years old, deciding.

Your nose has a crooked bridge you can feel when you breathe in. A fist, a loading dock, a bad night. Your shoulders ache from long hauls, and your lower back sends up a dull hot line. He is skinny and wiry and tired in a way sleep doesn't touch. The mattress under you is thin, the sheets cool, and a number comes up from the touch of the phone's edge: a little put away, in a savings account he checks like a pulse.

You lift your hands into the lamplight. The ring is plain and a little loose. The knuckles are scarred and rough, the nails cut short. You turn them over slowly.

Then you look up, and your voice comes out low and gravelled around the toothpick.

"Well. Hello."

The phone buzzes against your palm, another message for a name that isn't his, and you wonder how long you'll be here, and whether the wanting will come back before the sun does.